Former Frazer Township, Pa. officer Michael McSherry pleaded guilty to stalking estranged wife he tracked with department's license-plate reader

Michael McSherry, a Frazer Township, Pennsylvania police officer who had previously spent three years with the New Kensington Police Department, began using his department's license-plate-reader (LPR) system in March 2021 to look up the vehicle registration of his estranged wife, Alexandria Griffith. A GPS tracking device was discovered hidden under her car's dashboard at the end of that month. Investigators later determined McSherry logged into the LPR system at least 85 times between August 28 and September 15, 2021 -- while off duty, using his personal phone and computer -- to check on Griffith's and her mother's vehicles; Griffith's own victim-impact statement put the combined total of vehicle-tracking instances across both women's cars at over 250. McSherry's final shift at Frazer Township was September 3, 2021, after roughly six weeks on the job, meaning some of the logged searches continued after his own employment there had ended.

On September 10, 2021, police responded to a domestic incident at a Paulownia Drive residence in Allegheny Township after McSherry, during a confrontation, threw the couple's four-year-old son to the ground. He then barricaded himself with a loaded 9mm handgun and threatened self-harm before a brief standoff ended in his arrest. In the days that followed, McSherry called Griffith 73 times over Facebook Messenger in roughly an hour on September 14 after smashing his own cell phone, and texted her evidence on September 16 that he had accessed her phone account to view messages from as far back as 2013. Search warrants executed September 20 at a hospital and at a Natrona Heights residence recovered multiple phones and a suspected additional tracking device. A second arrest followed on September 28, 2021, bringing formal stalking and computer-misuse charges.

McSherry pleaded guilty on December 15, 2021 in Westmoreland County court to misdemeanor charges of stalking and official oppression. As part of the plea agreement, prosecutors dismissed two felony counts of unlawful computer use, a child pornography count, a harassment count, a second official-oppression count, and a terroristic-threats count. The judge sentenced him to 11.5 to 23 months in jail, with credit for time served since his September 28 arrest, plus five years of probation, and ordered him to have no contact with Griffith, their children, or her family.